Jessica Warman (edit name/settings)

About the Author (from the author page here: http://jessicawarman.com/jessica/ )

For as long as she can remember, Jessica Warman never wanted to be anything but a writer. As a little girl, while the rest of her friends were outside playing, she preferred to stay inside and write short stories on her dad’s computer. She wrote throughout elementary and middle school, read everything she could get her hands on, and told anyone who asked that she would grow up to become a professional writer.

When she turned 15, Jessica began attending the Linsly School, a coed boarding and college preparatory school in Wheeling, WV. There, Jessica became the president of the school’s Writer’s Forum. When she was seventeen years old, Jessica took creative writing and poetry classes at Yale University, where she earned straight A’s. She returned to Linsly to finish her high school education, and was named a National Merit Scholar during her senior year. This honor resulted in a full scholarship to Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania – the same school where J.D. Salinger once spent a semester.

Jessica stayed at Ursinus for a few months before transferring to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she was a student in the Honors College. She continued to write poetry and short stories, and at the end of her freshman year she published her first poems in Stirring: A Literary Collection. To this day, her poem “For Our Dead Cat…” remains one of Stirring’s “favorites.” Her publication in Stirring led to an offer for publication of a poetry chapbook by Sundress Publications, which Jessica eagerly accepted. Her chapbook, titled How We Spend our Days, was published in the summer of 2004.

By the time How We Spend our Days was published, Jessica had married her college sweetheart, and they were expecting their first child together. She had also begun to pursue her MA in Creative Writing at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA. While she was at Seton Hill, Jessica was offered representation by the fabulous Andrea Somberg, an agent at Harvey Klinger in New York City. Andrea immediately began shopping around Jessica’s first novel – a semi-autobiographical story about a young girl at a West Virginia boarding school.

When Jessica graduated from Seton Hill, she had quite a few short story and poetry publications under her belt, but still hadn’t sold her first novel. She continued to write. She had another child and moved to Pittsburgh with her family. By now, in addition to writing, Jessica had developed a passion for long distance running. She ran her first marathon in the fall of 2008. Around the same time, her first novel, Breathless, was sold to Walker Books for Young Readers.

While Jessica was editing Breathless, she sold her second novel to Walker. Where the Truth Lies is a companion novel to Breathless, and deals with several crossover characters. It is also set at a boarding school.

While she was working on Where the Truth Lies, Jessica sold the proposal for her third novel, which is currently untitled. The story centers around Elizabeth Valchar, who is awakened on her family’s boat, on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, by a noise outside. Unable to wake any of her friends who are on the boat with her, Liz ventures out to investigate the noise herself. She is horrified to discover that the sound is coming from her own body – drowned, dead, and bumping against the side of the boat.

Almost immediately, the proposal began to attract worldwide attention. The book will not be released until August of 2011, but it has already been sold to multiple foreign markets, including the UK, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Brazil.

As of today, Jessica spends most of her time writing and reading. Her favorite authors are JD Salinger, Christopher Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Foster Wallace. Her all-time favorite novel is Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. When Jessica isn’t reading or editing her third novel, she’s finishing up the proposal for her fourth book, currently titled The Good Kids, and preparing for the release of Where the Truth Lies in October. In her spare time, she still runs between six and ten miles a day. The rest of her free moments are spent with her children, who are now almost three and five, and her husband, Colin, to whom she has been married for eight years. Recently, Jessica and Colin decided to add to their family… with a Shih Tzu puppy, which her daughters promptly named Meatball.